Universal Schooling

The regulation required compulsory attendance at state-organised primary schools, an early model of mandatory mass schooling that later education systems across Europe and beyond drew upon.

The order established a national school system intended to bring universal primary schooling to the whole population, part of a wider modernisation drive that made mass literacy a state priority.

Article 26 called for free and compulsory elementary education for all, establishing a principle that later treaties and national constitutions on schooling would build upon.

The law mandated nine years of free schooling nationwide, underpinning a sustained expansion of enrolment that took basic education coverage from a minority to nearly the entire school-age population within a generation.

The treaty required states to make primary education free and compulsory and to encourage the development of secondary education, becoming the most widely ratified human rights instrument in history.

Delegates from more than 150 governments launched the Education for All movement, the first coordinated global effort to set enrolment and completion targets for basic education.

Governments renewed the Education for All commitments made a decade earlier, setting targets for universal primary completion and gender parity to be reached by 2015.

Free primary education brought more than a million additional pupils into government schools within weeks of the policy taking effect, becoming a widely cited model for fee abolition elsewhere in the region.

The law made free and compulsory schooling a fundamental right for children aged six to fourteen, obliging state governments to provide neighbourhood schools and setting minimum standards for facilities and teacher qualifications.

The goal committed 193 member states to inclusive and equitable quality education, including free primary and secondary completion for all children by 2030, extending earlier commitments beyond primary enrolment alone.

Pupils who entered the restructured 2-6-3-3-3 system in 2023 completed junior secondary and began transitioning into senior school, the first full test of a reform intended to widen subject choice and carry enrolment gains through to secondary completion.

Federal and provincial programmes continued to pay stipends to poorer families conditional on children attending school, an approach used to improve retention in a country that still has one of the world's largest out-of-school populations.

Despite a federal funding drive and continued World Bank-supported basic education programmes, Nigeria retained the largest out-of-school population of any country, with insecurity in the north-east and north-west still keeping many children from enrolling.

The ruling authorities maintained the ban on female education beyond grade six, and international agencies pointed to a growing cohort of adolescent girls with no path back into formal schooling since the restriction began.

Continued fighting and mass displacement kept most school-age children away from functioning classrooms, with United Nations agencies describing the scale of educational disruption as among the most severe of any active conflict.

The Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry, built on the existing UDISE+ school data system, continued its rollout to give pupils a portable identifier intended to track enrolment and progression as they move between schools and states.

Provinces raised admission quotas for academic senior high schools, easing a long-standing policy that channelled roughly half of middle-school leavers into vocational tracks after years of parental complaints that early diversion narrowed opportunity and depressed completion of the academic pathway.

The central government allowed states to hold back pupils who fail year-end examinations in grades five and eight, reversing part of the Right to Education Act's no-detention provision amid concern that automatic promotion was masking weak learning and rising dropout risk.

Weeks of student-led protests and a subsequent change of government disrupted the academic calendar across the country, with the education ministry later working to make up lost instructional time in the following term.

School districts continued to report chronic absenteeism rates well above those recorded before the pandemic, prompting several states to pass attendance-intervention laws and fund family outreach programmes aimed at closing the gap.